Condi RiceIn a new
interview with Fortune Magazine, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced
the idea of withdrawal from Afghanistan with typical illogic heavily tainted
with fear-mongering.

"The last time we left Afghanistan,
and we abandoned Pakistan," she said, "that territory became the very
territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our
national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan
fail and become a safe haven for terrorists.

"It's that simple," she declared, "if you want another
terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."

Codswallop,
horsefeathers, hogwash, claptrap and poppycock!

What Ms Rice
is adroitly dissembling is the role the CIA and Rep. Charlie Wilson, that
woefully misguided naÃ¯f, (to be kind) played in arming, funding and training
the mujahidin 'freedom fighters' which were to be thorns in the side of the
Soviet bear. These selfsame mujahidin then known as 'the Network' -- and included Saudi millionaire, Usama bin-Laden -
morphed with little effort into a larger movement to rid Muslim countries of
all Western influence. That movement is now referred to as 'Al Qaida'.

This bit of
essential back-story skirts the larger issue, though. Ms Rice, like all neo-cons
and many who sit on both sides of the aisles of Congress, wears the stripes of
international interventionism whereby the belligerent presence of US military might
is the righteous base-line upon which all foreign policy decisions are made.

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Our 'national
security interests' as Ms Rice and her ilk would have us believe would be
solved by the further expansion of US military forces to encircle the globe and
control by threat of force the policies of every nation and region on earth to
suit the perceived needs of the United States and US-based multi-national
corporations.

If one were
seeking a more truthful observation of reality, it would be much more appropriate
to paraphrase Ms Rice's neo-conic cant to state "Unless you want another
terrorist attack in the US, abandon the policies of empire and hegemonic
military dominance that breed exasperation, hopelessness and fanatical hatred
of the US policy of global intervention."

After years of professional starvation as a 'working musician', DC found his way to Taiwan where he has lived and taught English as a foreign language for 18 years - fourteen of them married blissfully to Yashan 'Linda' Huang.
"Having lived (more...)